Jan 9, 2008

Have you ever felt that you may need a self destruct button for your computer? Maybe your an international jewel thief, or a secret agent, or even a mob boss and you know that someone might be preparing to kick down your door and get your valuable information off your computer in a few hours? Perhaps you got a tip on the phone, or something just doesn't feel right. What is a shady character to do in this situation?

I'll tell you what they can do, they will hit their virtual self destruct button! Actually, it won't say "Self destruct" but you get the point.

I'm talking about HDD Wipe. This thing will perform a low-level wipe on your hard drive while windows is running! Don't ask me how that works. I suppose it is because most of everything you see on your screen is actually running in memory, and not actually on the hard drive. (If someone knows for sure, please leave a comment)

I have tested it out on one desktop machine of mine, and a virtual machine I was running. I wasn't able to recover anything from either of them.

It is kind of a cool process. When you select to wipe it will go through it's thing, then you click finish and all of a sudden you get a strange Windows error that says the system must shutdown. When it boots back up everything is GONE!

I wouldn't go as far to say that the FBI or NSA can't recover info from this, I don't know enough about it. I will say, however, that it is probably good enough to use if you are the company IT guy, and you want to take an old company computer to a recycling place, or a donation center.